Tag: 7-Segment

7 segment displays are a well established way of electronically displaying numbers and a small set of letters. They’ve been around for as long as I’ve been playing with electronics but were a pain to wire up given the number of LEDs involved.

Luckily things are a lot easier now that they are available on pre-made modules that uses an SPI interface. This is easy to setup and use on the Raspberry so for about £3 you can add a strip of 8 7 segment digits.

7 segment displays are a well established way of electronically displaying numbers and a small set of letters. They’ve been around for as long as I’ve been playing with electronics but were a pain to wire up given the number of LEDs involved.

Luckily things are a lot easier now that they are available on pre-made modules that uses an SPI interface. This is easy to setup and use on the Raspberry so for about $3 you can add a strip of 8; 7 segment digits.

These modules tend to all use the Maxim MAX7219. This IC does all the hard work and we can communicate with it using SPI and a few lines of Python.Read More

There are many sensors which can detect certain parameters from the real time world and transfer it to a digital world and we analyse them viewing them either in a LCD screen or some other display. But, it would always be not economical to use a LCD screen with PI for displaying small amount of data. This is where we codefer to use 16×2 Alphanumeric LCD display or the 7-Segment display. We have already learnt how to use a Alphanumeric LCD and a single segment 7-segment display with Raspberry pi. Today we will Interface 4-digit Seven Segment Display Module with Raspberry Pi and display Time over it.

Although 16×2 Alphanumeric LCD is much more comfortable than 7-segment display, there are few scenarios where a 7-segment display would come in handier than a LCD display. LCD suffers from the drawback of having low character size and will be overkill for your project if you are just planning to display some numeric values. 7-segments also have the advantage against poor lighting condition and can be viewed from lager angles than a normal LCD screen. So, let us start knowing it.Read More